Children’s Museum curator retires to focus on missions

Published 4:56 am, Friday, July 2, 2010

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With an exhibit that will remain in place until January and an interim to lead tours, Karen Winkler celebrated her last day as curator of the Museum of the Southwest’s Fredda Turner Durham Children’s Museum with a public reception to honor her retirement last month.

Retirement for Winkler, however, does not mean an end to her active lifestyle or her passion for helping others.

During her 12 years at the museum, Winkler said, she has become very involved with several international missions through First Presbyterian Church.

On a mission

She has helped to build houses in Mexico during spring break mission trips and worked with other church members to plant churches in Uganda, Africa.

Only days after her final day at the museum, Winkler was on her way to Mbale, Uganda.

“I’ve realized it’s too difficult when you have two weeks of vacation,” she said of her frequent trips abroad. “I’d like to be able to stay for extended times.”

In addition to missions in Mexico and Africa, Winkler also is heavily involved in Partners Relief and Development, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping refugees in the country formerly known as Burma.

Missionaries from First Presbyterian Church ended up in the offices of Partners Relief and Development during a fact-finding trip to Asia, Winkler explained.

“As soon as we got with Partners and saw what they do, it totally changed our focus,” she said.

Winkler now serves on the nonprofit’s national board of directors. She has traveled three times to Thailand — where many Burmese refugees reside — and gone three times into the country formerly known as Burma.

Steve Gumaer, founder of Partners, who recently traveled to Midland from his home in Norway, explained his organization’s reluctance to refer to the country by its legal name, the Union of Myanmar.

“The people of Burma largely don’t accept the name Myanmar,” he said. “(The government) just changed it overnight.”

Founding Partners

Gumaer and his wife, Oddny, started Partners Relief and Development in 1994 after visiting a refugee camp.

“I went there and I was invited to speak at this large church,” Gumaer recalled. “I did a sermon about God’s love and how he cares about his people.

“I felt like I missed the point.”

The experience changed Gumaer’s perspective on his faith and he and his wife decided to return to help the Burmese refugees. During their third or fourth visit to the camp he met a woman caring for a young displaced girl. The woman told Gumaer it would cost $30 to keep the girl alive for a year. He and his wife opened their checkbook and wrote letters home to friends and family, urging them to do the same.

Since then, Partners Relief and Development has focused on care for children, advocacy, sustainable relief and emergency relief.

The organization works to help Burmese refugees with basic needs such as clothing, food and shelter as well as more complex needs such as education and sustainable agriculture.

Partners, along with its partner mission Free Burma Rangers, recently drafted a human rights report recommending the United Nations refer the Burmese government to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

“Eventually these guys will somehow end up accountable for their criminal actions against their own people,” Gumaer said.

Explaining the country has been in a state of civil war since 1962 and that it employs the 12th largest army in the world with no outside enemies, Gumaer described the country as “a failed state.”

Through efforts at ethnic cleansing and violent responses to the Burmese people’s resistance, the government and Burmese Army’s attacks have resulted in more than 4 million refugees in the country and about 150,000 in neighboring Thailand. In the past 13 years, Gumaer said, the Burma Army has burned down more than 3,000 villages, leaving inhabitants to hide in the jungles without food, shelter, health care or education.

Art therapy

Through Partners, Winkler was able to meet with several Burmese children in a refugee camp in Thailand during one of her visits. After providing paper and acrylic paint, she asked the children to paint their pasts.

“They start off with these happy memories, as they progressed they started layering on the fires,” she said. “A lot of them had soldiers, a lot of them had death.”

Winkler interviewed the children after they finished their paintings, relying on a translator to articulate their often violent and tragic stories.

“They all have these beyond-belief, sensational stories,” Gumaer said.

Back in the states with the paintings, stories and photos of some of the children, Winkler relied on her museum background to put together an exhibit of the artwork. Last October, the exhibit called “Hope Behind the Red Bamboo” came to Midland and opened with a reception at ClayDesta Atrium before moving to First Presbyterian Church.

During her most recent trip to the refugee compound, Winkler again asked the children to create original artwork, this time by painting their hopes for the future.

Most of the paintings include roads the children are free to walk down, trees, flowers, houses and schools, Winkler said.

“They just want to go back to their village and live in peace,” she said.

Winkler plans to add five to 10 of the “hope” paintings to the exhibit, which she will travel with as it moves to other states this year.

“It just tells a compelling story,” she said of the exhibit. “It helps bring a little bit of awareness about what’s going on in Burma.”

Ongoing needs

Winkler plans to return to the country again soon. Furthering their support of Partners, First Presbyterian Church is working to plan a mission trip within the next year to help the refugees.

Midlanders can help by praying for the people of Burma, Gumaer said, and offering monetary donations.

“It costs $50 to provide for a family of five in the jungle for a month,” he said, noting Partners’ website is set up to accept donations. “When people really understand what’s happening and are given a way to help, most people want to help.”